


Memories are Films about Ghosts

by mleight23



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-19 11:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14236062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mleight23/pseuds/mleight23
Summary: Tessa, Scott, and a whole lot of angst as they undergo marriage counseling to get to Peyongchang.





	1. “When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires.”

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written a fic in forever, that's how much these guys have sucked me in. As we all know, this has a happy ending, but I've always been intrigued by just how messed up and codependent these two are and how they finally reached Tessa and Scott v 3.0

Tessa hated how easy it was for Scott sometimes. He had always had a command of his skates that she never did, his edges more pronounced than hers, his lines better, his glides smoother. It hadn’t bothered her much when they were young because they were learning so much, and she let the criticism given to her by Marina and Igor bounce off of her like Teflon. Tessa knew that she had the upper body of a dancer, the carriage, posture and grace to her arms that made her float across the ice in Scott’s arms. 

It wasn’t until she was 18 and spending more time in her parent’s house than she had since she was 7, when her parent’s arguments and the pain in her legs were things she tried to block out with music, long overdue conversations with her sister and flirtatious text conversations with an older man that she finally lost her nerve. 

All it took was a phone call from Meryl, and in hindsight Tessa doesn’t really know why she believed Meryl, but back then Tessa thought they were friends. It was maybe two minutes into the conversation before Meryl casually dropped the bomb that Scott had been auditioning partners, not only Canadians, and what were she and Charlie going to do if Scott suddenly started skating for the United States?

\---

Meryl was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a liar. Jordan may have called her an insensitive bitch while Tessa attempted to keep swallowing the bile that was building up in her throat. Jordan also had more than a few choice words for Scott. 

“Cara’s going to murder that asshole. DANNY is going to murder that asshole.” Jordan was seething, and Tessa could see tears welling up in her sister’s eyes. Tessa didn’t even have to ask why Jordan was crying. Jordan was always the more sensitive of the two, the one who had inherited their father’s fiery personality with its highs and lows. Jordan had cried her fair share of tears on behalf of Tessa, and it was only because it was Jordan that Tessa didn’t look at her like she had five heads.

“I’m just not good enough for him,” Tessa shrugged, before closing her eyes and laying her head back down against the pillow in a futile attempt to keep the churning in her stomach from overcoming her.

“That’s a lie and you know it, Tessa…” Jordan was interrupted by the beeping of her phone, “Listen. Cara just said that it was Marina’s idea and Scott already told her he doesn’t want a new partner. And he wants to know why the hell Meryl is telling you this and why you believed her.”

“I don’t know,” Tessa wanted to scream and if Scott had been present, she might have slapped him hard across the face, the way she had wanted to do when he told her he was dating Jessica the day after the two of them had made out while watching a movie curled up on the couch of her apartment. “Maybe because he hasn’t tried to talk to me at all since my surgery? I mean, at least she cares enough to call and ask how I’m doing.”

“You need to talk to him.” Jordan’s voice was fragile, and if she hadn’t been so angry, Tessa might have laughed. Her parents marriage was ending, and all Jordan had left as a constant was Tessa and Scott. Suddenly she found herself annoyed with Jordan too, annoyed with her stupid idea that she and Scott should date when they were kids, for starting her stupid crush on that stupid boy.

“No.” Tessa was aware of the bitter edge to her voice, to how her sister was suddenly crying a little harder, and how the only thing she knew how to do was pick up her own phone, scroll down to David in her phone, and rush off a text for him to come see her later. 

Years later in marriage counseling, when she told this story, she could see Scott out of the corner of her eye, the tears sliding down his face. She didn’t really recognize that the sounds of sobbing were her own.


	2. "What you risk reveals what you value"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Scott hates it when he can't fix things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my Scott muse really took over today! I am trying to make Tessa's chapters and Scott's chapter's different in style to focus on their personalities.

The first thing Scott learned about himself in his individual therapy sessions is the completely unsurprising insight that he cannot handle being unable to fix things. He was good at fixing things. That’s why he liked coaching, why he liked opening up the skate shop, why he liked being the technician. When his coaches showed him a step sequence, he would master it and then help Tessa with her footwork. When they asked him to be more animated, he would watch Tessa, the way she beamed on the ice. When Tessa asked him to make her fly, he could usually figure out how. He fixed Tessa’s wry neck with a Marvin the Martian pillow, held her when she cried the first night away from home in Kitchner, and gave up parties to drive her home to Ontario when they moved to Michigan. So when Tessa beamed up at him, her green eyes sparking, he could swear that her freckles danced.

The first time he realized he couldn’t fix everything was when they didn’t make it to Torino. He had known Tessa for eight years then, and he realized that other than that first night in Kitchner, this was the only other time he had heard her cry. Unconsolable sobs, the kinds that twisted his gut. He wanted to hold her and just say he was sorry over and over again until she would smile, but when he reached out for her, she pushed him away and ran. He stood frozen in place, feeling like he had truly failed for the first time in his life, not even noticing Marina next to him, commenting on how if he had a stronger partner, he would already be at the Olympics. 

When Tessa first told him she was having pain in her legs, he was dutiful, getting her bags of ice, massaging her legs, spending extra time with her to stretch in the early hours of their already 10 hour days, hoping beyond hope that any of what he was doing would fix it for her. Surgery was not what he was expecting, and even though Tessa didn’t shed a tear, he could see the devastation in her face. Her world was broken, and he couldn’t fix it. He couldn’t fix it with Marina attempting to find him a new partner, he couldn’t fix it with sand bags, and he sure couldn’t fix it with Meryl running her mouth to Tessa. Everytime he picked up the phone to call or to text, that same gnawing feeling to failure overwhelmed him. They reached a delicate truce thanks to Danny threatening to drag him over to Tessa’s house if he had to, but Scott couldn’t help but feel that her freckles had stopped dancing.

Winning the Olympics still couldn’t fix things, and he watched Tessa as she labored through physiotherapy sessions, was stretched and prodded in ways he was not envious of, spent extra time on the ice with her guiding her into her new stroking pattern, the one that was natural to him, but daunting to her. Glutes activated, pushing against the ice, together. Their key words, anything he could to save her from the pain and the irritation of Marina. He would drive her to the gym so she would have extra time to do her schoolwork, and he’d go through exercises with her on days her trainer was off, the ones meant to strengthen her core, to stabilize her and keep her from the pain. She was no longer the waif of a girl, but strong, and when he went to throw her in the air, he realized she was propelling herself into the air. It was the only time he remembered her truly smiling.

She never smiled anytime else, not really, not as she avoided Fedor who had been appointed to footwork coach. Scott wondered if he just punched him in the face, if that would fix everything, but it would only cause Marina to rage even more. Marina, who already compared Tessa to Meryl. Marina, who threw out the box of chocolates a fan had gotten Tessa for her birthday. Marina, who spent less and less time with them and more and more time with Charlie and Meryl. Marina, who didn’t care that Tessa could do seamlessly do an Arabian onto Scott’s shoulders, because maybe if she wasn’t so heavy, Scott wouldn’t look so small. So Scott gave Tessa chocolate, in hopes that maybe coming from him they would make her see that Marina was only being Russian. He gave her chocolates and he gave her sex because at least he knew how to get her off, how to know she had a few moments of pure bliss.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Tessa said one morning before practice, staring vacantly up at the ceiling. He took a long pause, before flipping over onto his stomach to look at her. He didn’t know when her freckles had really started fading, and with hair color matching his, her green eyes popped more. 

“Here?” His eyes darted back and forth, and he wasn’t sure if she meant here in her bed, or here in Michigan or here, just period, like an existential question from one of her philosophy books. She just sighed deeply before pushing back the covers and sitting up on the edge of the bed, looking at him with the saddest eyes he had ever seen.

“She hates us. Or me. She hates me.”

Scott realized then that she meant Marina, and he tried to tell Tessa she was imagining things, that they were only a year to the Olympics, and they couldn’t give up now. He thought he was fixing things by pushing her through, with his encouragement, with his visions of gold. He thought he was helping by putting their sexual relationship on pause so they could focus fully on their skating (not counting on meeting Cassandra and Kaitlyn and kind of just falling into those relationships). He could fix it. The gold would fix it. All he had to do was get them to the gold.

Instead they got silver, and the scariest thing was when he looked into Tessa’s eyes, he saw nothing. Not anger, not contempt, just nothing.

“I didn’t fix anything,” Scott said, burying his face in his hands before sitting up in his seat and looking at his therapist, the one he had promised Tessa he would come see twice a week on top of their weekly marriage counseling sessions once they moved to Montreal, “All I did was make it worse.”

Scrawled in his chicken scratch on the white board in his study below Tessa’s meticulous handwriting detailing their schedule for the week was the quote his therapist gave him, “Sometimes problems don’t require a solution to solve them; Instead they require maturity to outgrow them.”


	3. "“Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tessa has tried to lie one too many times.

The first time they had sex was when she came back from surgery, when she seemed so tiny and frail and Scott picked her up so gingerly that Tessa wanted to scream. 

“I’m not a doll,” she hissed at him as they lapped around the rink, and she tried to ignore the fact that her calves were still burning, that even though they had “made up” she could feel the resentment boiling up inside of her anytime he seemed too nice. Anytime before when the flashing in his eyes was her driving force to catch up, now he asked her time and time again if she was okay, his kiddo drawn out and overused.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered back, as he squeezed her hand gave an exaggerated stroke as if to cue her to kick in her glutes, and her body overpowered her mental protests, and she felt the flicking in her hip calming her down. She wanted to scream, “YOU ALREADY DID,” but she smiled weakly at him instead, and she hated that as much as he made the anger inside of her rise, he could calm it down just as quickly.

\--  
So she decided, in a very Tessa way, to prove that she was just as strong, if not stronger than before. Kate had gone to Calgary that weekend, and as much as Tessa normally would jump the chance to get out of Canton and see her sister, her excuse that the Olympics were less than a year away wasn’t that far from the truth that her mother found it suspicious. 

So that’s how Tessa found herself two vodka cranberries deep into the evening before she invited Scott over with an SOS, knowing that he was where he usually was on a Saturday night, drinking with Charlie at a house party because not even the Olympics looming could keep those two completely in check. The It was probably a good thing his own inebriation hid hers, and she offered him a swig of vodka (praying that she had enough mini-bottles collected in her toiletry bag to refill the vodka enough so Kate wouldn’t be suspicious) before her lips crushed against his.

This wasn’t the first time they had kissed, no. There was that time the summer before grade 9 where she asked if he could give her a proper kiss because she was embarrassed to start high school without that knowledge. There was that time when they first moved to Canton that they cuddled up to watch a movie and found themselves making out, but Tessa put that up to Scott being lonely. There was that time that Tessa actually let herself get drunk at Worlds, she kissed him before throwing up. She blamed the tequila, but really it was more that he whispered to her that Jessica couldn’t find out.

There was no mention of Jessica this time, merely fumbling hands, and the rising of his eyebrows as her hands slid down his pants and then again when she was prepared with a condom which she nonchalantly tossed at him while wiggling out of her best pair of underwear. There was only the wide gaze of his eyes as he saw her fully naked for the first time, straddled over him, suddenly acutely aware of how small her breasts were. She almost lost her nerve then until he breathed, “You’re perfect,” as his fingers gripped tightly on her hips and she felt for a few moments like she was. Inhaling sharply at the feeling of him inside of her, she waited until she felt his breath was caught in this throat, and she bent down, her breath hot against his ear, “Fedor can never know.”

\---

“I don’t even know why I said it,” Tessa avoided eye contact. Seven years later, and she was still trying to lie to herself about it. 

“I think you do.”

Tessa hated how steady the voice of her therapist was, how non-judgmental she was but how guilty it could make her feel, because it broke her narrative. Jordan was usually on her side, her non-skating girlfriends rolling their eyes and telling her to just get over Scott already, and she could pretend with her boyfriends. They were never smart enough to figure it out.

“I wanted to hurt him as much as he hurt me,” Tessa said meekly, suddenly nineteen again, staring silently up at the ceiling at her as Scott snored next to her, trying to feel victorious when she felt so empty.

“How did it make you feel?”

There it was, that question that Tessa always knew was coming. As she told Scott the first day they had a joint session, she studied psychology, nothing was going to come as a surprise to her. Yet it was the rawness of the feelings that always caught her off guard. 

“I felt...I felt worse.” Her eyebrows furrowed, and her arms crossed over her chest. Her gaze drifted downwards again, this time not in an attempt to mask anything, but in the same protective measure she used when she was young and would look towards Scott when she didn’t know what to do or what to say.

“I mean. I was never stupid enough to think my first time was going to be a fairytale.” And it wasn’t, she still remembered the awkward feeling of Fedor’s weight on top of her, how she just went through her skating routine through her head hoping to just get it all over with. “But I thought with Scott, that it would be different. But it never really was. It was always so, so….”

So it was Tessa at twenty-seven who had the first revelation about their sex life, who realized that it was never about friends with benefits, about their underlying attraction, about their chemistry. No, it was always about pent up frustrations and staking claim on their territory. 

\---

So it was Tessa, who a few hours later broke the frost that usually settled on the days they had therapy. She knew it wasn’t unusual with everything that was being stirred up for her and Scott to retreat into their separate corners to lick their wounds until they hit the ice the next morning. She always thought it would be Scott with his sunny optimism to come knocking on the door first with a peace offering, but here she was.

Scott’s eyebrows spoke for him again as he opened the door to his condo, and she could see the weariness under his eyes. As hard as she knew this was for her, it was even harder for him, and normally Scott would have taken off running at if he hadn’t made the ardent promise that their mental health needed as much work as their physical health.

She could tell he was shocked though when she wrapped her arms around him, because it took a few extra moments for him to squeeze her back, and for the first time, she really could feel her breaths start to match Scott’s like Jean-Francois’s said they would. 

“I love you,” she muttered into his chest, and there was a brief silence before she heard him say it back, and she buried herself deeper into his chest, lulled by the thumping of their hearts.


End file.
